SWTOR sent me an e-mail requesting feedback today....

From: David Grundy
Sent: Tue 31/01/2012 10:29
To: 'FeedbackSWTOR@SWTOR.com'
Subject: SWTOR Feedback

Dear Customer Support Team,

Having purchased your game for the launch, and having logged around 6 days of time on it over the last month and a half, I find myself well placed to give you some pointed feedback.

Currently, and unfortunately (as I’ve enjoyed the 1-49 experience), I will not be renewing my subscription; this is why.

· The game desperately needs a “Looking For Instance” or “Looking For Flashpoint” quick instance playing mechanism. Desperately.

· The game is currently not optimised for usage of dual processor cores, which the vast majority of machines these days have, and so on very high end machines only a fraction of the true capability of the machine is being used leading to much higher load times and lower FPS rates than should really be experienced.

· Far, far to many loading screens. That take far too long to load. I literally have a book next to my computer so I can read a few pages while I wait the 1-2 minutes for the screen to load. Given the amount of instance changes you make in the game, this is an intolerable nuisance.

· I finished my class quest at level 49, and pretty much now have nothing to do. This is bad design, as I’m sure at level 50 there is lots of direction towards your Elder Game activities, but at 49 there is nothing, with the game feeling done and finished. This should not be occurring, I should not have, after finishing my class quest, to go back and “grind more droids” to be able to progress. The class quest should be gated so that you can *only* finish it at level 50. To do otherwise simply gives a very poor game play experience.

I could give you a much longer list of considerably more, but I feel that very long list would probably not be constructive.

As a MMO researcher and academic (my PhD is in Customer Relationship Management in MMO games) I was extremely interested to see how SWTOR would progress and be a success, and I really hope that in future months you make the significant corrections necessary that your online community have been asking for. Perhaps then, given the high quality of the content, I may be persuaded to re-subscribe.

Currently, however the game is not meeting the most basic benchmarks of quality which I would expect from a Bioware game.

Kind Regards

Dr. David Grundy

Most Educational Forum Post Award of 2012?

Tis just a few days into 2012 and the SWTOR community forums have already thrown up one of the best forum threads and initial posts I've read on a MMORPG forum in a while. A simple plea to the community to "think critically", with a full explaination of what critical thinking is, and indeed a link to a very useful Youtube video (which I may indeed link some of my students to!) regarding what critical thinking means.



It is of course a pity that such pleas are rejected out of hand so quickly, but that is the nature of (almost) every forum I've ever read (possibly bar Terra Nova, but thats the complete opposite at times). I also thought the quick run down on logical fallacy was really well considered.

The next thing to talk about here is logical fallacy. There are things that are
presented as evidence that are actually not evidence. Here's a short list:

Ad-Hominem Attack: "Well you're a noobtart who prolly clicks and keyboard turns, so ur opinion is invalid." If the player cited is good at
the game or not is irrelevant to the discussion.

Argument from
Authority: "I'm a game developer myself, and I say that this game will succeed
beyond anything rational." The poster's credentials are irrelevant to the
discussion. If they are correct, they should be able to provide evidence of
their claim.

Non Sequitur.: "Lol I'm a chicken and i am delicious." When someone completely changes the subject to something that makes absolutely no sense, they have lost the argument.

Straw-Man: "Just because the game has bugs doesn't mean it's going to fail."
This is oftentimes not relevant, as the poster being cited did not say the game was
going to fail. This one is a bit complex, its the act of changing your
opponent's position to one you can more easily attack.

Evidence that MMO forums are becoming more considered places? Not a chance, but the seven pages of comments (at time of posting) are themselves an interesting read. That said, there is an argument that while on the one hand the Community Managers may be happy to see rational critical debate taking place, theres a benefit to keeping the proles in an endless, pointless, irrational battle (whats the MMO designer saying? "when they're all screaming at the same level, you know you've got balance right..."). After all, the last thing you may want on your Community forums is articulate critical thinkers deconstructing your game, giving a rigourous argument against acceptance of game flaws and bugs, and generally analysing everything which is said by the designers with an evidence based, sceptical, lens.

Though, wouldn't computer gaming be different if the Community Forums were full of such comment?

They'd be worth reading for one thing!